Review_Author: Baoguo Li
Book_Author: James Gee
Book_Title: Social Linguistics and Literacies
Reference: second edition 1996
Date: 4/29/00
Time: 9:48:17 AM
Remote Name: 128.175.34.122
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This book deals with Gee's social cultural approach to language and literacy. In traditional literacy study, literacy can be measured out and quantified like money, time. We heard such things as reading levels, amounts of literacy, so literacy is a kind of commodity that can be bought and sold. In short, it is a asocial cognitive skill having nothing to do with human relation and society. Gee also refutes those who thought that literacy could lead to high order of cognitive skills by citing the experiments done by Scribner and Cole in Liberia. They two found that it was not literacy but schooling that contributed to the development of cognition. What's more, he proves that literacy could not make a person to be successful in a society.
As for language, Gee holds the view that every language is composed of many social languages. When a person begins to speak, he knows who he is and what he is doing but he maintains that a single person is a multiple whos. One shows his identity in different contexts by using different social languages. Sometimes one knows the grammar of the language and even knows how to express himself but he still fails in communication for the reason that he does not know his identity. According to Gee, the meaning of language is governed by four principles, they are exclusion, guess, context and cultural model principles respectively. A word has no meaning of and by itself apart from other words. Cultural model have great implication for the teaching of language and literacy. One can only lean cultural models by being acultured, by being open to and having experience with a culture or social group. Hence he concludes that good teaching is a moral act.
Apart from language and literacy, Gee talks more about discourses, which he considers to be a more broad category than language and literacy. For him, discourse is composed of five systems, namely, prosody, cohesion, overall discourse organization, contextulization and thematic organization. This five systems work together to structure language and express what counts as making sense to particular groups in particular settings. Discourses involve words, acts, values, beliefs, attitudes , gestures and even your clothes. So discourses can be called an identity kit. Gee himself defines discourses as "a socially accepted association among ways of using language and other symbolic expressions and artifacts of thinking, feeling, believing and acting that can be used to identify oneself as a member of a social group". Gee divides discourse into primary discourse and secondary discourse. Then how do people come by the discourse that they are a member of? Gee argues that discourses can only be acquired not learned. That is to say, they could not be got from instruction, but only from enculturation into social practices. He states that literacy -- the ability to read and write-- is secondary discourse.
At last he argues that language, literacy and discourses exist together, and the behaviors of any individual person are meaningful only against the discourses that can recognize and give meaning to that behavior. What a person says is always a product of the discourse he is in at the time, but also the other discourses that he is a member of.
I recommend this book to linguistics majors and language teachers in college and middle school.